Flying In The Face Of Death

50 Years Ago, Gunner Became Hero In Midair

MIDLOTHIAN — Nineteen-year-old Henry Sadler knelt in the gunner's nest of a Navy bomber and choked the grips of a 30-caliber machine gun.

Two hundred feet below him and his squadron of PV-1 Venturas, two crippled Japanese gunboats bobbed in the Pacific Ocean.

Earlier that day, the Newport News High School graduate's group and a larger Navy bomber had flown from the newly captured island of Iwo Jima with orders to hunt and destroy enemy ships. After two hours of patrolling a pale blue sky, they discovered two boats lurking about 50 miles off the Japanese mainland.

After five runs at the ships, one was on fire and sinking quickly. The other listed badly and looked ready to swamp. Sadler's plane had taken a hit or two, but, so far, everyone was fine.

Then, as the plane banked into a steep left turn, an explosion ripped through its cockpit. From his glass bubble in the rear of the plane, Sadler realized the crew was in trouble.

"It made a hell of a lot of smoke," he said. "And a hell of a lot of noise. There was some yelling, too, but I don't know who hollered what."

Sadler, a thin kid with a shock of red hair, scrambled to the front of the plane and found a blood-soaked cockpit. Part of pilot Leigh Wilson's right leg had been blown off, and a shell was lodged in the co-pilot's hip. Neither was able to fly.

He hopped into Wilson's seat as co-pilot Donald McCarthy fought to keep the plane from spiraling into the water. Then, as other crew members tended to Wilson and McCarthy, Sadler grabbed the controls and took over the flying.

A friendly landing strip was 600 miles away, the plane's instruments were out, one of its fuel tanks was blown off, and a tail-gunner with no flying experience was acting as the pilot.

Sadler turned the plane and tried to remember which way it was to Iwo Jima.

Today, Henry Sadler sits in his Chesterfield County home leafing through some yellowed newspaper clippings about his flight. He says he never thought about dying March 27, 1945, and he's matter-of-fact about his wartime heroics.

He doesn't mention his Distinguished Flying Cross, one of the nation's highest awards for heroism, until he is asked about it. He credits his crewmates - W.W. Van Dalsem, Robert Henn, and John Heckemeyer - for helping him with the flight. He seems uneasy when told he likely saved six lives.

"It was fly the thing, or ditch it in the ocean," he says. "And given how badly Wilson and McCarthy were injured, you know you can't do that. These are good guys. This is family."

Sadler retired as a bank executive from Signet in early 1986. He plays some golf when his 70-year-old joints will let him and travels with his wife when they can. Every now and then, he hooks up with his war buddies and they relive the March 27th flight. They laugh about it now, but Heckemeyer says beneath the surface there's plenty that's serious.

Most crews become close, he says, but there's something different here. Something Heckemeyer, the crew's radioman, has trouble describing.

"After that, we were really together," he says from his home in Washington state. "I mean ... it was just so wonderful to be alive. And `Red' was responsible."

From the cockpit, Sadler peered down into the water searching for a string of volcanic islands that would be his road map back to Iwo Jima. Both Wilson and McCarthy had been given shots of morphine and, for the moment, seemed to be doing as well as could be expected.

During training, Sadler had sat in the co-pilot's seat several times, and the informal lessons were paying off. He found it surprisingly easy to keep the plane in the air and more or less on course.

"It's not like you're in traffic on the Beltway," he says. "As long as you can keep it in a 35-mile radius you're all right."

As wind screamed through the holes in the cockpit, his mind focused on two things: get the plane back as quickly as possible - his speed was about 300 mph - and then figure out how to land it.

He didn't know how much fuel was left, although he says that probably wouldn't have mattered. He was going to push the PV-1 as hard as he could for as long as he could. He hoped his training in plane maintenance and his knowledge of the bomber's mechanical system would tell him whether the engines were about to die.

Heckemeyer kept an eye on McCarthy while turret gunner Henn worked to control Wilson's bleeding. Heckemeyer remembers thinking how well Sadler was doing, given everything that was going on around him. But he, too, was thinking about the landing, and his thoughts weren't comforting.

"He was pretty cool, all in all, but I remember how hard those things were to land," he says today. "I was worried we were goners."

After almost two hours of tracing the path of the volcanic islands, Sadler spotted Iwo Jima. About the same time, McCarthy said he would be able to handle the landing. They put him back into the seat, and Sadler relinquished the controls.